Bygone Scotland: Historical and Social

We cannot tell—it is highly improbable that we ever shall know—from whence came the original inhabitants of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. Men living on the sea-coasts of the great quadrant of continental land which fronts these islands, would, when the art of navigation got beyond the raft and canoe, venture to cross the narrow seas, and form insular settlements. It is indeed possible that, before that subsidence of the land of Western Europe which separated our islands from the mainland and from each other, was effected by the slow but ever-acting forces of geology, men were living on the banks of ancient rivers which are now represented by the Clyde, the Thames, and the Shannon.

The authentic history of Britain dates from the Roman invasion; before this event all is myth and legend. Half a century before the commencement of our era, Julius Cæsar, whilst consolidating in strong and durable Roman fashion his conquest of Gaul, was informed by certain merchants of the country that on the other side of the narrow sea which bounded them on the north, there was a fertile land called Britain, or the land of tin. With his legions, in the trireme galleys of the period, Cæsar crossed the narrow sea, and, so far as he went, he conquered the land.

The inhabitants were in a rude condition of life; semi-barbarous perhaps, but certainly the peoples of Fingal and Ossian in the north, and of Caractacus and Boadicea in the south, had advanced far beyond simple savagery. Climatic and geographical influences had moulded into a robust, if a fierce and stubborn type, the common materials of humanity. The ancient Britons had, in their ideas of government, advanced beyond mere clan chieftainship. Their annals, in stone cairns and the songs of bards, commemorated bygone battles and deeds of warrior renown. They had a religion with its trained priesthood—it was not a religion of sweetness and light, but of ferocity and gloom, of human sacrifices, and mystical rites. Its temples and altars were clusters of huge stones, arranged in forest glades on some astronomical principles. The Druidic faith was one of the many offshoots of ignorant barbarism, in which the celestial orbs and the forces in terrestrial nature—lightning and tempest—life and fire—were deified. Its priesthood was a close order, holding in their mystical gripe the minds and lives of the people. It has been said that the ancient Britons were such firm believers in a future state, that they would even lend each other money, to be repaid in the spiritual world. Their language was a dialect of the Gaelic—the language spoken in more ancient times over the greater portion of Western Europe.